Jani Christou: composer of musical surrealism

Vicky Steiri

Vicky Steiri has studied Musicology at the University of Athens. She is a postgraduate student at Goldsmiths College, University of London (MMus in Contemporary Music Studies) and an active

Jani Christou is one of the most important Greek composers of the twentieth century. Although he was only 44 when he died in a car accident in January 1970, he was regarded by many as one of the leading composers of his generation. He was controversial, highly talented, and greatly admired both in his own country and abroad. His music was heard at some of the most prestigious international music festivals in the world. Moreover, before his untimely death, he was preparing to unveil the most ambitious project of his career - a large scale contemporary opera based on Oresteia, a massive stage ritual based on the text by Aeschylus, for actors, singers, dancers, chorus, orchestra, tape and visual effects. Oresteia would have received its world premiere at the English Bach Festival in London in April 1970, with further performances scheduled for France, Japan, America and Scandinavia.

All of Christou’s music springs from his philosophical and theoretical studies. His interests include philosophy, anthropology, psychology, theology and comparative religions, history and pre-history through to occultism and art. This is particularly so in the music covering the last ten years of his life, where his compositional techniques are at times transmuted beyond conventional music. A key term is ‘transformation’. As Christou explains in one of his most celebrated writings, ‘a credo for music’ (Review Epoches, vol.34, February, 1966):

The logic of transformation cannot be explained in terms other than those pertaining to itself. It is very difficult because the validity of such descriptions depend on whether or not we are talking or listening from experience. But an image can help. Let us take as a basic concept space-time. We can go even further and consider the object as occupying space-time within space-time (namely solar space-time). We can go even further and consider the object as occupying space-time within space-time, when we reach out to galaxial space-time dimensions. We can go to intergalaxial dimensions. That same object assumes vastly different meanings, yet it is the same object. If we now think in terms of acoustical objects or events, we can perhaps, by analogy, see how the same events can have ever deepening implications. Transformations in music do just that. Absence of transforming powers keeps the acoustical events on one level, thus catering only to our sense of decoration. Art which does not rise above this level may be craftful, but it is no longer meaningful. I think there is a much greater interest in art that is of a liberating nature than in art which is of a decorative nature; liberating in the sense of liberating us from the common space-time continuum, pointing to other areas of experience […] For both listener and composer the danger is of being seduced by the whore of decoration and aesthetics. […] Every age experiences transformations within an aesthetic characteristic of that particular age. The obstinate transplantation of an aesthetic of one age to another or even a generation to a generation is not only futile and invalid but is also a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy. Contrary to what is commonly held against the music of our day, its frequent jarring and shock-provoking methods can be symptoms of the necessity for liberation from an inherited aesthetic and worn-out patters of thought.

He was born at Heliopolis, N.E. of Cairo, on January 9th, 1926, to Greek parents. In 1945 he traveled to England to study under Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. At the same time he studied music privately with H.F. Redlich, the distinguished musicologist and pupil of Alban Berg, and in 1949 traveled to Rome to study orchestration with F. Lavagnino. He also traveled widely in Europe, culminating for a short period in Zurich, where he met and attended lectures in psychology with Carl Jung. For more information on Christou’s life and work, you can visit the official site, www.janichristou.org

While examining Christou’s creative output, one can detect an evolution from conventional musical notation and use of serial techniques towards the invention of his own personal musical notation and ‘meta-serial’ techniques, in combination with new concepts. As the colleague and friend of Christou, composer Theodore Antoniou has observed, the evolution of Christou as a composer came from two sides: firstly, he was a sensitive receiver of the world’s cutting-edge compositional styles and techniques and he got involved in everything new that occurred. Secondly, he was influenced by philosophers and thinkers who tried to focus their thought on the evolution of human societies.

With the arrival of the new notation, the new concepts of Praxis and Metapraxis appear. Praxis is the action which conforms to the logic characteristic of the art (a conductor conducting a concert), whereas Metapraxis is the action which is purposely performed to go beyond the piece (a conductor required to walk about, speak, scream, etc.) A Metapraxis is an assault on the logic of the performer's relationship to his own particular medium. A violation within a single order of things. Or, a subtle pressure against the barrier of meaning which any system generates for its own preservation.

Antoniou draws a comparison between the late Iannis Xenakis (the internationally acclaimed Greek composer) as being apollonian, where Christou is both apollonian and dionysiac in the sense that he was influenced by the rationality of the western world and the mysticism of the East. This also explains the infiltration of drama in his composing technique. He acquired the western technique to support his ideas, but he always allowed space for the idea of the internal human dynamism in its several appearances in history, pre-history and meta-history. Moreover, his philosophical background offered him ways of bridging the whole gamut of human evolution. Christou's musical philosophy was essentially, if not entirely, Jungian in concept. Jung believed that each person partakes of a universal collective unconscious that persists through generations: Jung held that the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.

Christou projects the worlds of myth, ecstasy, mysticism and primitivism to the present and mixes them with the contemporary world of masses, group psychology, panic and hysteria. Through his works, he endeavours to create rites and rituals, where even the most routine and stereotypical actions of everyday life are transmuted and elevated. In the words of the composer,

I am therefore concerned with a music that confronts; with a music that wants to stare at the suffocating effect, even terror, of much of our everyday experience of living; with a music that does NOT seek to escape the relentlessness of patterns in which this experience keeps unfolding. With a music that not only does not attempt to escape this experience, but that seeks out its forms – and eats them up, and throws them up again, just as dreams do.

Antoniou considers Christou a composer of musical surrealism (the term does not even exist in musical terminology): he saw mankind through all its history, pre-history and meta-history. Whatever the situation he wanted to create, he would use contemporary symbols. For instance, in one of his last works Anaparastasis I (1968) the first scene and lyrics are taken from Oresteia by Aeschylus, where the guard has been waiting for a year on a roof-top for a signal signifying the fall of Troy. When this happens, there is the psychological panic of a man who has waited a whole year for this moment. But the way the conductor communicates with the musicians is surreal; when panic commences, the ensemble and the conductor start reciting safety directions explaining the sounding of alarm-apparatus on a ship at sea (!). Moreover, the conductor indicates traffic signs which refer to traffic lights (when he/she says red, everyone stops, etc). It is amazing how he unites all those elements in order to express the feeling of panic for us today and for a guard in an ancient era. Musical Dadaism with Cage is already known, but what about musical surrealism? Maybe Christou’s music is an example.

In his oratorio Mysterion (for narrator, three choruses, tape, orchestra and actors, 1965-1966), one of his masterpieces, he uses again the idea of the continuum of human history. The lyrics and concept are taken from ancient Egyptian funerary texts: the sun-god penetrates the underworld nightly, traveling in his ‘boat of a million years’. The inhabitants of the underworld must cry out the Words of Power in order to be redeemed. Nevertheless, in the middle part, the action is transferred to a 1960s cocktail party! How can this be interpreted? Christou gives us some hints in the introduction of the score:

Within this climate, then, Mysterion unfolds with the logic – or lack of logic – of a dream, of a dream dreamt today, or tomorrow. Words are articulated, but their meaning cannot possibly be clear, and the text cannot be followed. After all, this consists entirely of magical formulas in a remote language. But even if the words were contemporary today, the distortions would still be the same. Nevertheless it is not always necessary to understand words in order to be affected by them. It is not, for instance, necessary to understand what a rioting crowd is saying in order to be affected by the shouting. Perhaps everything is an exclamation. In that case it is the context and tone of voice which are significant. And in that sense non-words can be meaningful. As Mysterion unfolds, words are articulated. For us their meaning cannot possibly be clear since these express magical formulas in a remote language. But psychologically they can be as clear to us as our own contemporary Words of Power: the language of science and technology upon which we have been reduced to depend so desperately.

Christou was a great loss. He wrote a great number of works and although his name remains respected in contemporary music circles to this day, performances of his music are extremely rare; few musicians and conductors are able to perform his works, especially those of the last period, which are the most experimental. Had Christou lived longer, his particular musical amalgam – containing all his advanced technique, experience and philosophical thought – would only have grown richer and more diverse.

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